


Sick of Losing Soulmates

by theloverneverleaves



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: 2x03 spoilers, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, Multi, None of which end well, ft. a series of Magnus' past relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-18
Updated: 2017-01-18
Packaged: 2018-09-18 11:00:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9381548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theloverneverleaves/pseuds/theloverneverleaves
Summary: The thing about living for centuries, is there always seems to be someone else to lose.People say it must get easier.It doesn't.aka. Magnus Bane is sick of losing people, ft. Alec Lightwood 2x03





	

At seven years old, his best friend is a little girl called Melati, who lives at the farm next to his. It’s the place he’s grown up, a simple existence, uncomplicated. Magnus has always been aware he’s not like other people - his eyes hum amber, and he vibrates with an energy that no one else can seem to understand. He’s not like other people, but no one bothers him too much for it, so he’s young enough to pretend it doesn’t matter.

She’s a little younger than he is, but it doesn’t change anything. They’re best friends, partners in crime. They have adventures out on the land, play with everything in sight. Her family has a cat, and so often they spend time with it, just relaxing in the sun.

At nine years old, they talk of the future, of getting older and _boring_ , and promise never to lose each other.

At ten years old, magic surges in his veins, crackling and vibrating with a blue energy that his parents can’t understand. And as with all things that people cannot understand, they call it the work of the devil.

His mother calls him a demon, blames herself, and disappears into the night. Magnus is the one who finds her, hanging from the barn rafters in the early dawn light. His father finds the scene not two minutes later, and tries to drown him in the stream. Instead, magic defends itself, and his father is the one lying dead in the stream.

Melati wanders over not a moment too late, to see her best friend in the world buzzing with magic, dripping wet, standing over his dead father with the eyes of a demon.

She screams with terror, runs away, and Magnus never sees her again.

That’s the first time he loses someone he thought he could keep forever.

It’s not the last.

 

* * *

 

Within a few months, Magnus Bane has become an expert at hiding in the shadows, staying out of sight. The eyes of a demon make him a plague upon the earth, and every time he looks in the mirror, he can’t decide whether to scream or cry, because why is he like this, why would God punish him like this? What had he done that was so bad that he needed to be like _this_ , humming with something he can’t understand, a demon energy he doesn’t _want_?

He must have deserved it. That’s what his faith said. The wicked were punished, and so he must be wicked. He certainly is now. He killed his own father, after all.

And so wicked he becomes, lurking in the shadows, stealing and cheating to survive, hoping for something to change, even if it never does.

At twenty five, he meets his first werewolf. He doesn’t know it at the time, but the boy is beautiful and hopeful and optimistic, and Magnus doesn’t know any better. They lurk in the shadows together, exchanging touches and glances and kisses, and Magnus is just so relieved to have finally found someone who doesn’t think him crazy, who can explain a few things to him, who doesn’t call him a devil or a demon on sight. Magnus calls him Ciro. He never knows if that’s his real name.

It’s Ciro who tells him some warlocks have glamours, to hide who they are, walk among the mundanes. It’s Ciro who curls up in a cold, empty room and holds his hand as he tries to make that thrum of energy in his veins into something definite, something with a purpose. It’s Ciro who cups his face with love and tells him to try again, tells him not to give up, because he’s capable of being whoever and whatever he wants.

It’s Ciro who gives him hope where there is none.

And eventually, it’s Ciro who rips it away.

The Shadowhunters of old don’t have the Accords, don’t have any laws to live by. And when the Shadowhunters find out about the downworlders lurking in the shadows, the blood on the streets from Ciro's transgressions, there’s no hesitation when it comes to hunting them down.

Ciro leaves him behind, lets him fend for himself as he protects himself, and the look in his eyes has only the barest hint of apology. ‘I’m sorry, but we have to stop pretending. It was never real. It could never last.’

Only it was real for Magnus. And he, so foolishly, never thought about how it would end.

He uses that dreadful energy as a weapon that night, stunning and maiming and running.

He gets on a boat to the Netherlands that night, a shipping route back to the Empire.

Ciro never tells them where he went. Maybe that’s the only apology he can give.

It doesn’t stop the way the knife twists in his heart, the claws digging in. He was a demon, a devil. And the angels said he should die for it.

Hiding in the hold of a ship bound for the edge of the earth, living in squalor and poverty for months on end, it was hard to believe he shouldn’t.

 

* * *

 

He should have learned his lesson about falling in love.

As the decades pass, it becomes woefully apparent that magic is not the only curse he is afflicted with. The poor do not count the years drifting by, and he moves too much to track the passage of time by things aging around him, but eventually it has been too long, and he knows nothing is right. People do not stay the same.

Not like he stays the same. Not the way he stays the same.

His eye wanders to men and women equally, and he knows it shouldn’t. He should never have loved Ciro at all, just another symbol of how wrong he is. The whole world beats him down, says it’s wrong, but maybe wrong is just in him. Maybe wrong is all he can be. His mother killed herself, his father dead by his hand, his childhood best friend terrified of him on sight, and his lover left him to die.

What is there to hold on in that? What is there to live for?

He’d take his own life, if his heart wasn’t so stubbornly clinging to life. If his stubbornness didn’t keep him moving forward, to screw over all those who’d tried to do the job for him. Everyone telling him to die only made him want to live all the more, cursed and ruined as he was.

Then he goes to Spain and meets someone who gives him something to live _for_.

Her name’s Estella, and she’s as beautiful as she is passionate. She lives life with a vibrancy and vigor he hasn’t seen for so long, a lust for life that’s enviable. She’s pious and risque all at once, restrained and free, polite and brash. She’s a wonderful clash of contradictions, sharp as a tack and full of ideas.

In the space of a lifetime, she’s the first one he trusts again. She’s the only person she tells the truth to, the one she shows his true eyes to, the blue in his veins and the devil in his soul. She might flinch and recoil, her faith telling her to push him away, but her heart does the opposite and holds him all the closer.

He confesses he’s never been sure what to do, learning himself, battling with himself in the darkest corners where no one would find him, toying with magic as if it was an experiment, a fire to be poked until it flare up in the right direction.

Estella, in all her vibrancy, suggests that if he’s so lost, he should find someone to teach him. Magnus hasn’t wanted to trust anyone since he left home, and certainly not anyone from his world, a world that would hunt him down like a dog as soon as it would help him. What he’s learned he’s learned alone, and it’s safer that way.

But Estella doesn’t give him an option. It’s Estella who leads him to Catarina Loss, a healer in her town who it’s said can create miracles. Estella and all her faith wanted to believe the woman to be holy, but Estella and all her logic said that there were more things in this world than her God, and maybe Magnus needed some of that.

It’s Estella who tells him to rescue Catarina from the witches’ pyre they try to burn her on for helping. It’s Estella who hides them both, who gives them a safe space to exchange notes, to learn together. It’s Catarina who gives him endless books and texts on magic, but it’s Estella who teaches him to read them - or her brother does, anyway. It’s Estella who holds him tight and tells him he’s safe and loved, and he will always have a place with her, even if his magic always has and always will scare her.

It’s Estella who tells him it doesn’t matter where you came from, it only matters where you’re going.

It’s Estella who whispers sweet nothings in his ear the night he discovers who his father is, how deep the devil really is in his veins, how strong the power is that threatens to overwhelm him and drown him once more, if he’d let it.

It’s Estella who withers away as she holds him, decades passing like an instant, moments trickling away before he realised they were going anywhere.

It’s Estella who promises there is no one else she’d rather have spent her days with, even if it meant running and hiding and giving up so much to do it.

He buries her on a Tuesday. He takes her back to her homeland, that little town where he met the girl who taught him how to live. He hopes she’d like it there.

It’s all he can do, for that bright young girl who ran away and gave him every day she had.

 

* * *

 

There’s brightness in his mourning. Catarina leaves Spain with him, travels north, and when they reach England they meet Ragnor Fell, who teaches them more than they could have learned alone. Ragnor might be older, but by virtue of genetics, Magnus proves himself to be the stronger. It’s the first time he’s really compared himself against anyone - after all, Catarina would only ever heal.

The sense of satisfaction it gives him makes him sick.

He spends decades thinking of the beautiful Spanish rose he left behind, but eventually, as with all things, he moves on. He moves to London, and it’s in that vibrant glowing metropolis that he learns to be free, to think of everything Estella embodied, everything she would want.

He knows kissing men is wrong, but it feels so right, so he does it anyway. He embraces his quirks, embraces that this is who he is. That sweet young girl loved him, enough to give him her whole life. He has friends now, people to rely on. They teach him not to be ashamed. They teach him to live, by simply allowing him to be who he is.

He might have spent over a century getting there, but he finally feels stable in himself. He finally feels ready to embrace it all, sexuality, magic, everything. No matter what. No matter what the world said. No one would ever want to love him, not wholly. Even Estella only tolerated his magic at best, instead of embracing it. But he was done with trying. He’d given up on the practice of bending himself into the molds of others. Now, he was ready to find his own.

There’s endless people in the next forty years. Men, women, werewolf, seelie, mundane, people from all walks of life. He’s not fussy about where he gets his pleasure. But get it he does, as he learns to live, to party and enjoy and thrill, because this is the life he was never supposed to have, the one he was never meant to be allowed.

He drifts in and out of London, travelling as he saw fit. It’s not until the Victorian era that he really stays. A lot happens then - especially with the Shadowhunters. Travelling becomes easier, thanks to Henry Branwell and his ingenious portal, which only needs a spark of magic to come alive. The Herondales and the Carstairs make an impression, and Tessa Gray becomes the singularly most unique person he’s had the pleasure to meet.

He also meets Camille.

He doesn’t know why he ever told himself it could work. She’s vicious and selfish and she only knows how to take and take and take.  But there’s a spark there, something between them, and he tells himself it will work. She won’t die, not like Estella. And he doesn’t have the run away, not like all the others in between. It’s perfect.

If only he could get her to love him.

He loves her, of course. There’s no question about that. Magnus, as he does all times, deep down, falls head first and invests too much too early. He tells herself she’s the one, and does everything he can to make it work. He trades his house for a gem, shows her the world, enchants her trinkets and jewellery and things she likes, whatever she asks for. He leaves her to want for nothing.

And Camille just takes and takes and takes.

Maybe he’s blind. Maybe he’s just foolish. But he tells himself she loves him back until he’s presented with undeniable evidence that she doesn’t, that she’s more interested in other things. She flits away for months at a time, to other men, other lives, as he later discovers. Ragnor and Catarina warn him, to their credit. They tell him she’s no good, but words that he doesn’t want to hear fall on the deafest of ears, and only when it is too late does he realise his mistake.

He confronts her, and he doesn’t realise they could fight like they do. He does realise, all at once, that she’s been manipulating him into doing whatever she pleases for years, that she’s only ever been committed to this relationship because having a powerful warlock as a boy toy was all too useful for her to pass up.

He tells her he loves her, and all she does is laugh. Love, she says, is a mortal affliction. Something _they_ are not subject to. They are better than love, she says. They can enjoy themselves, without being chained down by such a ridiculous and outdated concept.

He’s been used, and he’s never felt more dirty.

She doesn’t die, but he loses her all the same. And instead of lingering with the memories, he runs to New York. New York, he thinks, is safe. New York is hundreds of miles from Camille Belcourt, which is more than enough distance to mourn the loss of something that never really existed in the first place.

It was stupid, really. To think she could have loved him. To think he could have been happy. No wonder this is what happened. After all, you get what you deserve, and the blood of hell runs within him.

Maybe this is all he deserves. He can live, yes, and he can be as free as he likes - kiss whoever he wants, fuck whoever he wants, do magic other warlocks can only ever dream of and have as many lavish parties with people he barely knows as he fancies. But love?

Love is the stuff of fairytales. And he has only ever been a nightmare.

 

* * *

 

Peru is an adventure in so many ways.

It’s Catarina who talks them into it, into travelling to somewhere so foreign and so familiar all at once. There’s work to be done, and Magnus prides himself on his business these days. He’s made a name for himself in New York, found a place for himself in that big, thriving city that he had never really had before. New York is home, but Peru is an adventure. And well… with all the years in the world and the power to go anywhere, why wouldn’t he?

What he doesn’t expect to find in Peru, though, is the young man playing a charango on a street corner, sweet music more entrancing than Magnus could explain.

He hasn’t been with a mundane since Estella, but something about that boy lures him in, draws him closer. He takes music lessons just to spend time with him, and it’s not until months later that the boy gently suggests they drop the pretenses because Magnus is clearly the most hopeless student he’s ever had the misfortune to teach.

It makes him laugh. He gets a kiss out of that moment, anyway.

He keeps flitting back to New York, and around Peru in general, working as always. Work keeps him whole, keeps him sane. Maybe on some level it feels like penance. He has never been good, never been the man he wished he was, wished he could be. With his work, at least he can make the world brighter, put his considerable skills to work where they were most needed. He prides himself on his business.

And a business it is - he’d tried working for free, once. Never again.

It feels like one of those brief, warm, summer romances, stained in brightness and sunlight and laughter. Only it’s not that brief. Magnus stays for far longer than he had ever expected. Months blend to years and before he knows it time has dripped away, time he would barely even notice. And at the core of his heart, he knows he hasn’t felt like this since Estella. He _wanted_ to feel this way about Camille, forced himself into it, but she had never loved him back, never really wanted to commit. Estella had loved him with everything she had, but she’d always been afraid of him. She’d never truly been able to accept the fact he was a warlock - merely tolerate it, ignore it, and encourage him to look after himself. He never did magic around her. She had never liked it.

Maybe that’s why he hid from Imasu for so long. Maybe that’s why he kept the very heart of who and what he was buried far away, where that boy could never find it. That was why the excuses dripped away when he was working, the stories for where he flitted off to. Maybe it was more than that, though. Maybe, after Camille, he was just afraid to commit. Rejection stung, and a broken heart is hard to repair.

The moment he thinks about taking the leap, Imasu makes the choice for him. Imasu, the young musician with a passion about him that Magnus knew he could never restrain. Imasu calls it off, tells him that their relationship was never going to last. Magnus, after all, is too flighty. There’s an irony there. This is the most committed he’s been in years, and here is his lover, telling him he hasn’t given enough.

Imasu leaves, and Magnus leaves as well, back to New York, back to the safety of home. Ragnor tells him to go after the boy, that he would be a fool to give up so easily, but Magnus simply shakes his head. Imasu wanted a mundane life, wanted someone who could give him every single part of their soul. Magnus could never do that. He would never burden someone he loves with a piece of the devil.

It’s for the best, he says, as he dives back into work.

It’s for the best.

It’s for the best.

What he never admits, was that maybe the heartbreak was easier this way. Everyone he has ever loved has left him eventually. Might as well get it over with. It hurt less, this way. If he held on, things would only get worse. It was time to let go. Of so many things, other than just Imasu.

He has work to do. That was more important.

 

* * *

 

Maybe Camille was right. Love is not for immortals. Love, a curse that wounds him more than it heals.

He’s lost everyone he ever grew close to. Dead, gone, miles away. Catarina isn’t even on the same continent right now, Tessa absorbed in her own world, and Ragnor…

He’d thought he’d given up on love, thought he was safe from heartbreak. But Ragnor dies in his arms, and he’s grieving in a way he never realised he could. He has so few friends he’s kept for the ages, and here he is, having lost someone he never thought to fear losing.

Ragnor is gone, and there’s a giant, raw, gaping wound in his soul.

It’s hard, walking the empty halls of Ragnor’s house, trying to secure things, to keep things the way he would have wanted. The guilt presses down on him, because none of this would have happened if he hadn’t brought them here, none of this would have happened if not for _him_ . If he’d refused Jocelyn Fairchild’s pleas, if he’d kept the Shadowhunters away and seen Ragnor himself, if he’d called, if he’d done _something_ , _anything_ differently… maybe Ragnor would be alive.

Maybe he wouldn’t have lost another part of his soul to a place he could never get it back from.

It’s not until much later that day, when he’s going through Ragnor’s photos, drinking his wine, that the grief finally crushes him. After the sun has long set, the skies fall dark, and he thinks about all he has lost, how brief it all his.

Everyone he loves leaves him, one way or another.

He doesn’t know why he’s surprised anymore.

But maybe that’s all the more reason to grasp at what is there. Ragnor, who was always so full of hope, who always told him that immortality was a gift not to be wasted, that he should take what he wanted because ageless or not, opportunities were not to be allowed to pass by.

He knows what his opportunity is now, and at the end of the day, he does it to honour Ragnor’s memory as much as he does it for himself. Because if Ragnor Fell knew his dearest friend was sitting at home whilst a boy he liked married a woman he didn’t love, he’d kick his ass to hell and back.

But it doesn’t repair the hole. No matter what joy he feels, no matter what happens, no matter what Camille tries to break, no matter what happens… none of it patches the raw hole in his soul.

They all think it is so _great._ To be immortal, to have centuries ahead of you with no apparent end. None of them see the downsides. None of them see all the pain and loneliness and misery that comes with it, of being the one who has to simply _endure_. How could they understand? It’s not in their nature, burning hot and bright and fiercely as they all do.

Magnus loathes them.

Magnus envies them.

 

* * *

 

Alec was never supposed to be this _important_ to him. Not that he wanted Alec to be another one of his flings. He’s been having those for decades, careful not to get attached, not to fall too deeply. But Alexander Lightwood changes everything, and he doesn’t even realise he’s doing it. Maybe that’s why it hurts so much when Alec refuses his help, when Alec pushes him away.

He has no idea how few people are freely offered the help of Magnus Bane, for whatever they need, no matter what.

When Alec promises to come to him, he believes him.

He realises how misguided that might have been when he finds Alexander in the Institute, sick and _dying_.

Ragnor died not days ago. He kissed Alec not _days_ ago. He’s risked every part of his bruise, battered, fractured heart for the chance to kiss Alexander again, and now he’s _dying_.

Everyone he loves leaves him. He doesn’t know why he’s surprised.

And yet, it doesn’t stop him trying, stop him pouring every single piece of his considerable magical talents into the boy just to keep him _alive_ , even if he’s not all there. He does everything he can think of, spends every minute of the hours that tick by doing every single trick in the book. None of them work.

Of course not. He’s lost and lost and lost and lost. Why would now be any different?

And yet he can’t help but beg. He can’t stop himself cursing the fates, cursing Jace Wayland, cursing Alec’s dedication and loyalty and goodness, cursing the very angels that made him. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. None of it was meant to be like _this_.

There’s nothing he can do. And it drives him crazy.

It was a throwaway remark about fairytales, really. He was stupid to even try it, to even think for a second that a wish in magic that really doesn’t exist would repair what’s broken. He curses himself for being foolish enough to believe. His life is not a fairytale. And even if it was, why would he expect it to work?

True love implies a depth of feeling Magnus is sure he has never experienced. True love - a pure love, something that would never waver, never fade. Something that encompassed and accepted every inch of who the other person was, for all their flaws and quirks and qualities. It was unconditional.

His parents had never loved him. They’d cursed him, called him a demon, and he’d ultimately killed them both.

Ciro had abandoned him when he’d needed him the most.

Estella might have loved him, but she’d never loved all of him. She might have loved the man, but she’d never really embraced the warlock.

Camille had never loved him at all.

Imasu might have felt some affection for him, but it hadn’t been enough to make him stay.

He’d known Alexander Lightwood for a matter of weeks, and had been in a relationship with him for a matter of days. Why on earth would he expect _true love_ to work for that?

Besides. True love is the stuff of fairytales. And if life is a fairytale, he is not the dashing prince, the hero of the hour.

He has only ever been the monster lurking at the end of the story, and everyone knows that monsters do not get true love.

Monsters do not get happily ever afters.

And yet, when he watches Alexander’s body give up on itself, cave in and die, breath leaving him, it doesn’t stop the hole in his soul tearing itself into a whole new shape. He won’t recover from this, he thinks for a moment. He has no one left. He has _nothing_ left. There is nothing to come back for.

(Had he been allowed to continue down that road, he would have thought that it was time to teach Valentine Morgenstern there is _nothing_ more dangerous than an enemy left with nothing left to lose, especially when that enemy is a Prince of Hell itself.)

But then Alec breathes. Alec comes back.

And Magnus breathes too.

Life is not a fairytale. But life is not all dark, either. Sometimes there is hope. Sometimes there is a way back.

In that moment, he promises not to give up. He promises not to let go. Because even if life is not a fairytale, it is an adventure. And he will every chance he is given to have one. To treasure what he _has_. He is sick of losing people. He won’t let Alec go so easily.

The Shadowhunters come and go, marching Jace off like the traitor he never could be. Alec is allowed to stay, for now. And after a moment, he realises they are alone. For all the sleeping he’s been doing, Alec looks exhausted. Magnus settles him back down on the chaise, conjuring a blanket out of nowhere, gently wrapping it around the precious boy who stole away a heart he didn’t think he had left.

Alec doesn’t have the energy for words, and Magnus hushes him when he tries it anyway. But Alec slides his hand into Magnus’, and squeezes gently, a look in his eyes he can’t mistake.

_Thank you. For everything. For bringing him back. For not giving up. It’s everything. You’re everything._

Magnus smiles.

_Of course. I’d give you the world if you asked. For you, I’d do anything._

Alec sleeps. And for the first time in what feels like a century, Magnus does too.

He dreams of Alec, alive, safe, happy.

It’s the greatest gift he could ever wish for.

 

**Author's Note:**

> you can find me [@tumblr](http://isabellebiwoods.tumblr.com/) if you feel the need to share my tears


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